Category Archives: Uncategorized

2017 Winner Rappaport Prize Winner: Chloe Ahmann The George Washington University “Waste to Energy: Imagining Renewal in Late industrial Baltimore”

Abstract:
If it is built, the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project will be the largest trash incinerator in the nation, burning 4,000 tons of waste per day to generate “clean,” “green,” “renewable” energy, while at the same time releasing thousands of pounds of lead, mercury, fine particulate matter, and carbon dioxide annually into Curtis Bay, a late-industrial community in south Baltimore. Though the project now seems unlikely to materialize because of environmental opposition, it was met with optimism when first proposed in 2009. Then, on the heels of the global financial crisis and following three decades of decline spurred by industrial flight—and in the context of demographic changes that brought black and immigrant neighbors to south Baltimore—many white working-class residents envisioned the incinerator as a path toward social and economic renewal. In short, waste (previously understood as an unfortunate byproduct of industrial capitalism) came to be imagined as a generative force in this community.

In this paper, I track two parallel discourses of renewal—both counterintuitive—that crystallized around the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project in south Baltimore. One was an environmental discourse propelled by technocrats from industry and government who argued that trash incineration, when compared with ostensibly more deleterious alternatives (like landfilling), ought to be regulated as a renewable technology. A second emerged among residents who saw participation in the waste industry as a last-ditch opportunity to reinvigorate their ailing economy. Like regulators, residents’ reasoning hinged on weighing the incinerator’s impact against hypothetical alternatives: the Fairfield Renewable Energy Project would be “better than another chemical plant,” “better than another dump,” and “better than another 20 years without a job.” And like technocrats who saw the conversion of waste into energy as an alchemic process, many hoped that the incinerator would catalyze development in late-industrial Baltimore.
This paper emerges from 24 months of ethnographic field work and extensive archival research conducted between 2012 and 2016, and is part of a larger project examining the historical and embodied dimensions of risk in Curtis Bay. Informed by wide-ranging scholarship on waste (e.g., Reno 2015), sociotechnical imaginaries (Jasanoff and Kim 2015), and US late-industrialism (e.g., Fortun 2012, Walley 2013), it queries what the future looks like from disposable places and examines how people maneuver when different kinds of futures are at stake. Ultimately, it argues that these two discourses of renewal—rather than reflecting conceptions of the future anterior (Povinelli 2011) or engagements with an ethics of the possible (Appadurai 2013)—instead hinged on counterfactual comparisons and maneuvers between futures near (escaping unemployment, managing waste) and far (the health effects of toxic accumulation, the specter of climate change), gaining ground through subjunctive engagements with a yet-to-be-materialized environment. Recast in this light, both technocratic dreams and localized narratives of waste, race, and decline betray a deep ambivalence about the kinds of futures that are plausible within a geography of “undesirables.

2017 Panelist Awards
Elise Trott Jaramillo University of New Mexico “Fluid Publics: Water-Sharing and Water Politics in New Mexico”
Landon Yarrington University of Arizona “The Nature of Ruins: Historical Infrastructure and Contemporary Environment in Northern Haiti”
Néstor L. Silva Stanford University “Comfort Food: The Environment and its Politics in a Standing Rock Kitchen”
Kari Dahlgren London School of Economics and Political Science “Transitions and Liminality in Australian Coal Mining Communities”

As spaces where vast socio-cultural and biological collections are housed, museums are ideal sites to reckon with human-environment interactions over time, particularly in the Anthropocene epoch. Increasingly, individuals working in museums (and institutions themselves) are finding ways in which to mobilize biological and cultural collections to deal with on-the-ground environmental issues and conservation initiatives. This informal roundtable will create space for discussion between and among museum practitioners and environmental anthropologists on the ways in which museums and their collections can matter – in material, symbolic, theoretical, and practical ways – to environmental anthropology. Some questions to address include: How can museum collections inform better socio-environmental policies and practices in increasingly unstable political, economic, ecological, and geological climates? What role can (or should) museums play in conservation initiatives? How can environmental anthropologists engage with museums and their collections to further both academic research and applied projects on human-environment interactions? And what can be learned from engaging with museums and their collections to broaden understandings of human-mediated environmental changes and the Anthropocene as a theoretical concept and geological epoch? As an informal session, we invite a broad range of academics, professionals, and students from anthropology, archaeology, museum studies, and beyond to discuss these issues.

We invite those interested in learning more about the Anthropology & Environment Society’s gender-politics task force to join us on Friday afternoon for a “pop-up” session at the AAAs. After gauging interest at last year’s AAA’s, we now host this inaugural meeting to discuss goals for the upcoming year, including analyzing data on citational practices within our field and making recommendations from A&E about these practices. All our welcome. Please watch Anthropology & Environment’s twitter feed for location information.

Call in number for remote participants: 605-475-4350 access code 669634

Call or text organizer Diane Russell if you have any problem with access: 202-674-4867

Much of the attention in the relatively new conservation evidence field has focused on “rigorous” methodologies such as impact evaluations (e.g., Baylis et al. 2016) and systematic reviews with stringent standards for evidence in journals such as Environmental Evidence and Conservation Evidence. Anthropologists have contributed a tremendous body of knowledge to and about conservation, yet within the conservation evidence sphere this knowledge can be perceived as “anecdotal” if it is recognized at all. Adams and Sandbrook (2013), among others, have argued that “evidence-based conservation should adopt a broad definition of evidence to give meaningful space for qualitative data, and local and indigenous knowledge.” Questions we will discuss in this roundtable include: What are the entry points, benefits and pitfalls of engaging with the conservation evidence community? How do we represent multiple perspectives about conservation outcomes? And gauge the implications of deploying different evidence bases for outcomes, not only for social actors but also for species and ecosystems? Potential follow-ons from this roundtable include a journal article or commentary, a community of practice or other joint projects.

Organizer: Diane Russell, Senior Social Scientist, U.S. Agency for International Development, Office of Forestry and Biodiversity ([email protected] or [email protected])

NB: This session is the personal effort of Diane Russell and does not represent the views of USAID or the U.S. government.

Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on Anthropology and Environment Society: “Satellite Sessions” at the AAA Meetings

Put the Anthropology and Environment Society’s Rappaport Student Paper Prize at the AAA into your calendars. The session is scheduled for Thursday, November 30, 10:15 AM – 12:00 PM.

We’ve got a great line up and I hope you can make time to attend. Here is the list of presenters:

Elise Trott Jaramillo, University of New Mexico: “Fluid Publics: Water-Sharing and Water Politics in New Mexico”
Chloe Ahmann, George Washington University: “Waste to Energy: Imagining Renewal in Late-industrial Baltimore”
Landon Yarrington, University of Arizona: “The nature of ruins: Historical infrastructure and contemporary environment in northern Haiti”
Nestor Silva, Stanford University: “Comfort Food: The Environment and its Politics in a Standing Rock Kitchen”
Kari Dahlgren, London School of Economics: “Transitions and Liminality in Australian Coal Mining Communities”

By Sophia Jaworski (University of Toronto) A middle-aged woman in the Greater Toronto Area wears a charcoal mask in her bedroom to prevent asthma spurred by breathing in the circulation of floor varnish, cigarette smoke, and cleaning chemicals in an apartment building air vent. Needing to wear the mask is intimately tied to shortness of … More

“I felt rushed so I was like ahh, I couldn’t catch what everyone was saying,” Kate reflected. Kate was one of five students assisting on an interdisciplinary project, entitled Presence to Influence, that focuses on examining how Indigenous Peoples and other marginalized groups influence global environmental governance. This late evening in September the seven person team led by Dr. Kimberly Marion Suiseeya (Northwestern University) and Dr. Laura Zanotti (Purdue University) was in Honolulu huddled around a small digital recording device, with our laptops clicking and notebooks strewn about. It was the third day of the 2016 World Conservation Congress (WCC). The Presence to Influence team’s hotel rooms had become makeshift meeting areas, where we assembled chairs around small tables and beds for our daily debriefs. At once exhausted and exhilarated from over 35 hours of data recorded, more than 1,000 photographs snapped, and pages and pages of field notes collected at the Congress, team meetings would often begin with sighs of exhaustion, excited conversations from moments that resonated that day, and the never popular discussion of data management.

Read More

Posted inUncategorized|Comments Off on ENGAGEMENT: Presence to Influence: Examining the Politics of Representation in Global Environmental Governance